I’m finally prepping the Vista lappie for a clean OS install. A Vista disk and 2 Gb stick of RAM are on the way — Woo! Hoo! I’m also trying to optimize and speed the machine up even more. I’ve once again left the Aero interface behind in favor of Vista Basic. Upward of 60 Meg of RAM was immediately released! Let’s see… modified index settings to minimize number of indexed locations, hacked registry to allow more than two simultaneous downloads, turned off Remote Differential Compression, disabled games I don’t play, and I ran disk cleanup.
The screencap below is from Disk Cleanup of my system drive. Notice the amount of space consumed by user and system error reports! This is a first for me. I never considered what happens to error reports, you know… the cryptic messages accompanying those annoying “This program has crashed would you like to send info to Microsoft?” screens. I assumed (incorrectly) that event reports might also be included in that ~ 6 Gb of space so I opened the event log (under “Performance Information and Tools–>Advanced Tools).
Let me say my hat’s off to MS for providing the mother of all information gathering tools. Every electron that moves inside your Windows machine is tagged, tracked, and described here. There’s some really useful information under the Microsoft/Windows section of Applications and Services Logs, including logs that track how long it takes your system to boot and shutdown to the millisecond. You can also learn what applications are slowing those processes down. I’ll continue to clean, strip, and tweak until RAM and Vista disc arrive.
